NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover has recently released a new batch of photos taken from its current location in the Martian Gale Crater. The images were posted online by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which designed and built the Mars rover and is now managing the robot’s mission on the Red Planet.

The snapshots were taken by the rover’s Front Hazcam on Sol 2080, or June 13, and reveal a bizarre blurred shape that appears to be moving on Mars, reports the Mirror.

The British news outlet cites the claims made by conspiracy theorists, who suggest that the mysterious object could be proof of life on Mars and that its perceived movement resembles that of an animal running across the red dirt on the planet’s surface.

These allegations are being made particularly by the “Secureteam10” YouTube channel, which uploaded a video playing the Curiosity rover images side by side.

The video, posted on June 14 and available below, starts off with narrator Tyler Glockner asking a question that indicates the new rover footage is being seen as a potential proof of extraterrestrial life.

“Has NASA once again slipped up and let evidence of potential alien life reach the public in a new set of photographs captured on Mars by the rover?”

Glockner argues his case by showing that the rover has captured something which he refers to as a “strange blur,” “a strange anomaly,” or a “movement” like one might expect to see from “an object moving extremely quickly.”

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“As the rover is sitting still, there is a point where you can see what appears to be this blurred object,” Glockner says in the video, noting that “the strange blur appears in two separate photos.”

According to Glockner, the fact that this mysterious blur actually disappears in some of the frames proves that it “isn’t a piece of sand or something on the lens.” If that were the case, the same blur would have been visible in potentially all of the photos taken by the Curiosity rover in that exact same area, he argues.

Footage of the mysterious blur captured by the Curiosity rover on June 13.Featured image credit: Mars Curiosity RoverNASA/JPL-Caltech

“Whatever this is, it’s down there on the sand, on the ground,” says Glockner.

While his explanations seem to resonate with some of the Secureteam10 followers, others have pointed out that the peculiar sighting is nothing more than a shadow or a small dust storm, notes the Mirror. As the Inquisitr previously reported, Mars has been recently hit by one of the biggest dust storms ever observed on the planet.

The “Secureteam10” YouTube channel is reportedly known for publicizing controversial material that keeps the public apprised of alleged alien findings and UFO sightings.

For instance, last month, Secureteam10 published a video revealing a triangular-shaped UFO “syphoning energy” from a lightning bolt, and which immediately went viral, the Inquisitr reported at the time.